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Monday, April 16, 2012

Little Otik (April 19th and 21st at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[LITTLE OTIK screens Thursday April 19th at 8:20 pm and Saturday April 21st at 8:45 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr. Someone once described the movies of Jan Svenkmajer as unbalanced
Czech accounts. I think it was me, in fact. I've seen and written about sooo
many movies. They kind of blend together. Should've done something worthwhile
with my life, conceivably, but there do exist people who actually get decent
money just for piddly things like calling Jan Svenkmajer movies unbalanced
Czech accounts. For a little bit there I thought I could be one of them.

Svenkmajer, a surrealist artist-animator and master of
macabre visuals and juxtapositions, in 2000 conjured up one of the more
foreboding (and lesser-known) fairy tales from the canon of the Brothers Grimm
and modernizes it into this morbidly humorous feature. Yes, old news; ever
since LEPRECHAUN (really even before THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, when you think
about it, but those earlier ones had class), filmmakers have been mining
fairy-tale material and spinning darker, if not outright genre-horror takeoffs.

find out that they can't conceive a child, and the world
is suddenly fecund with images of fetuses, bodily fluids and fertility (to see Hollywood's idea of this
vibe, compare-contrast with the Greg Kinnear/Lauren Holly rom-com A SMILE LIKE
YOURS. I did this. Because none of you were there to perform and intervention and save me.
Damn it).

Karel takes an uprooted tree stump and carves it into a gnarled, doll-like wooden figure to give to his wife as a surrogate. The trick works all too well. Bozenka goes quite insane, faking her pregnancy (right down to
imitation morning-sickness vomit) whilst doting on the totem as
though it were a flesh-and-blood infant. And Bozenka's obsession
results in the `birth' of "baby Otik" as a real living...thing, a
writhing, whining, inhuman monstrosity that the screen's two creepiest Davids -
Lynch and Cronenberg - wish they'd dreamt up first.

Anyway, the grotesque little being possesses an insatiable,
ravenous hunger. And when he's eaten all the food that Karel can bring,
well...Let's just say that if Roger Corman and myself are ever stuck in an
elevator together for several days I hope I've got the presence of mind to ask
if this same Brothers Grimm material "fed" into LITTLE SHOP OF
HORRORS.

Svenkmajer uses his stop-motion to - bring Otik to life,
in addition to some nasty little “traditional” cartooning to more or less
convey the storyline of the Brothers Grimm original. Yes, I’ll admit the ending
is a little on the weak side, but getting there is most of the grim Grimm fun.

Aren't there, what, like five or six
dark-side-of-Snow-White movies out this year alone? Ignoring the
three or four previous dark-side-of-Snow-White flicks that had
already been done. Somehow I blame the TWILIGHT franchise for all these
Mother-Goose-Gone-Bad movies, studio suits figuring that with the only
moviegoers with disposable income being the 12-to-18-year-olds-in-custody
battles, sinister reboots of their old bedtime tales back from the pre-011 days
when dad had a job and he and mom were still together are a natural draw.
OTESANEK, I’m glad to say, stands outside that facile market-profile gimmick.

Though, now that I muse upon it, a teen-horror takeoff on Anderson’s original,
non-Disneyfied, “The Little Mermaid,” which is quite a tragic and downbeat tale,
could be of interest. Or at least preferable to the sexed-up remake of CREATURE
FROM THE BLACK LAGOON that Universal’s been threatening for ages. (3 out of 4
stars)